American Whiskey & Canadian Whisky

Ingredients

w w

1 1

old-fashioned glass

Instructions:

Pour in glass with or without ice. Drink.

The Wondrich Take:

We always had a rule of thumb: bourbon for sipping, rye for mixing. We don't know where we got it from, but time was it worked pretty well, especially since there was no real sipping-grade rye on the market. That wasn't always the case. William C. Biles & Co.'s "Cincinnati Whiskey Price Current" for October 10, 1911, a red-jacketed booklet purporting to contain price quotes for "every Standard Distiller's Brand of Bourbon and Rye known to the Trade," lists 74 different brands of rye, many of them old and expensive. Of course, it also lists an impressive 176 different brands of bourbon. (Bourbon, as you no doubt know, is made mainly from corn, with "small grains" [barley malt and rye or wheat] mixed in the mash; rye is rye, of course, plus barley malt and corn; both are aged in new charred oak barrels for at least four years.) That's a lot of choice, but that's not all: Biles & Co.'s "every Standard Distiller's Brand" isn't the same as "every brand"; not by a long shot.

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Americans used to make all kinds of whiskey (we spell it like the Irish do, with an "e"; in Canada, they follow the Scots and do without). There were bourbons in profusion. Judging from the old catalogues, price lists, ads, and whatnot we've got lying around here at the Esquire Institute for Advanced Research in Mixology, there must've been at least 300 different brands. There were ryes, probably at least 150 of them, in three different styles: Pennsylvania, Kentucky, and the so-called "Maryland process" (no idea what that involved, unless it was Old Bay seasoning). There were "pure-malt" ryes and white corn whiskeys, both of which left out the small grains. There was just plain whiskey, claiming to be neither bourbon nor rye. There were Tennessee whiskeys (still got a couple of those). There was whiskey "mashed in two bushel tuns" (now that's small batch: Most modern mashtuns hold thousands of gallons). A few folks even stuck with old-fashioned pot-stills, like they were using in Scotland, although almost everybody else had switched to continuous-running column stills. (They're easier to work but yield a lighter, cleaner and less funky spirit.) And speaking of Scotch, there were at least five or six brands of "pure malt" -- like Scotch, but without the peat; they all claimed to have medicinal value. (There was even "A White Whiskey, made to suit the taste of those who are used to the White Whiskey of the Fatherland" -- in other words, schnapps.) And all that's just the straight stuff. There must've been at least three times as many blends on the market, either of straight whiskies (the good blends) or of straight whiskey and grain alcohol (the cheap ones).

But that's history, and therefore bunk. What really matters is what survives; what you can throw a lip over today. Of blended whiskey we shall not speak: The cheap stuff's still around, but it's awful, and the good stuff has been replaced by Canadian whisky, for which see below. There's a brand or two of American malt whiskey on the market, and a spot of white corn whiskey. Schnapps is doing fine, if you consider serving as a carrier for artificial root beer or butterscotch flavoring doing fine.

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Then there's bourbon. Lots of bourbon -- although we'd prefer not to venture a guess as to exactly how much, particularly when someone can guess for us. After all, that's why we keep an advisory board here at the Institute. We rang up Gary Regan, our bourbon expert (he wrote the book -- literally). How many brands of bourbon out there? After the "Oh, Jesus -- " that any person of sense will give out when sandbagged with a question like that, he came up with a ballpark figure: "About a hundred." Not too shabby at all. One of them's even pot-stilled, and many of them are as well-crafted and aged to as venerable a venerable antiquity as any before Prohibition.

Unfortunately, counting the ryes is easier: A. H. Hirsch, Black Maple Hill, Classic Cask, Jim Beam, Michter's, Old Overholt, Old Potrero, Old Potrero Single Malt, Pikesville Supreme, Rittenhouse, Sazerac, Stephen Foster, Van Winkle Family Reserve, Van Winkle Old Time, Wild Turkey -- and that's it. A mere 15 brands (and good luck finding 'em in your corner liquor store). One could write a book on what happened to rye: America's first whiskey, the traditional tipple of the mid-Atlantic states, the whiskey that George Washington made at Mount Vernon (and suppressed in the Whiskey Rebellion), the kegs that rode in the riverboats and -- and we'd better stop before we really get going. We don't know why rye pretty much died out; we just know when. It survived Prohibition okay, limped through World War II, when all whiskey production stopped, and just kinda petered out after that, even as bourbon was hanging tough. We suspect it has to do with the thing that makes a twenty-one-year-old lathe-operator from Rochester, New York paste a Confederate-flag decal on the rear window of his pickup, causing his great-great-grandfather -- shot through the forehead at the Battle of the Wilderness while serving in the 140th New York Volunteer Infantry -- to spin like one of the chair legs his young descendant spends his days turning out. There is, however, room for some cautious optimism: out of those 15 brands of rye, nine have come on the market in the last ten years -- and they're all sipping-grade. (The American malt's new, too; we haven't tried it, so we'll reserve comment on its grade.) We need a new rule.

Oh, yeah -- Canadian whisky. They make a lot of it, have been doing so for a long time, and shall continue to do so. It's smooth, light, and, generally, blended -- not always with grain products alone. Their regulations are as loose as ours are stringent. For example, prune juice is not disallowed. Other than that, we have absolutely nothing to say about it.

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